Best Freeware Video Editor

I am using - trying to learn to use - Windows Movie Maker but have seen it much denigrated.

And when I add narration the movie displays only in jumps from scene to scene as though my pc can't handle the job but it is a P4 3G machine with 4G Ram running XP SP3 and could always handle most things, old though it is.

I only want to clean up home digital camera videos, cut out the rubbish, join a few little ones together, add some narration to make family home vids of this that or the other trip we took. Nothing very special or important.

I wonder if there's a better tool for me to get in the freeware realm?

Or even a paid item if it doesn't cost too much.

p.s. is it my imagination or has afterdawn changed a lot? I don't remember it looking like this. And it seems a lot less 'busy' or something. Perhaps I'm mixing it up with some other forum...